December is always a great time to sum up the year and look at all the great things that made our work easier in the past 12 months. Here we’re focusing on WordPress and the top plugins of 2012.
If your site has ever been infected by malware then you can surely appreciate the value of a good security plugin.
In short, this plugin provides some top-quality .htaccess protection for your affiliate blog. Malicious scripts and hackers don’t stand a chance against it.
Even though the plugin is very powerful, it’s also quite easy to use. If you don’t feel like tweaking the settings manually you can confidently go with the defaults.
Pretty Link has been around for a while, but it’s still the top link-cloaking plugin for WordPress.
Its main functionality is quite easy to grasp. It takes whatever URL you input and redirects it through your domain.
Apart from the cloaking functionality you also get basic tracking (number of clicks, unique/repeat clicks ratio).
The only premium plugin on this list but it has truly earned its spot. Right now it’s the best contact form solution for WordPress.
Besides standard contact forms, the plugin also enables you to create more complex forms like guest post submission forms, review submission forms, sales forms (PayPal supported), even photo submission forms. This is a great way to get user generated content if you’re in a niche that makes it possible.
The plugin lets you add new fields with a single click and then rearrange them using drag and drop functionality. On top of that, it integrates with the style of your theme.
This is a very interesting site migration plugin. Especially handy if you’re constantly launching new affiliate sites using a similar set of settings.
You can use this plugin to create an image of your basic affiliate blog and then install it on another domain in minutes.
Everything is really easy to use and makes launching new sites significantly faster.
This is one of the best backup plugins for WordPress. It allows you to do manual backups, or schedule them to take place automatically.
The plugin supports full AES encryption, so no one will be able to use your backups (only you).
You can exclude certain files and folders from the backup or backup only the files that have changed since the last run.
This is one of the coolest plugins we’ve stumbled upon in 2012. In short, this plugin tags your posts automatically.
The main difficulty with tags is that you have to spend a significant amount of time to set them properly and make sure that they’re a usable addition to your affiliate blog.
This plugin takes your predefined list of tags and their corresponding words, and then assigns the best matching tags to each post you publish.
Not that long ago, Akismet was the go-to spam protection plugin. These days, however, a lot of people decide to search for alternatives due to the plugin’s strange behavior (like flagging the blog author’s comments, for example). Antispam Bee seems like a good solution.
There’s actually not much to explain here… The plugin sits in the background and takes care of the comment spam automatically. It simply works.
SEO Smart Links is probably the top interlinking plugin for WordPress. Your interlinking (inner link structure) is a known factor in SEO. However, sometimes it’s difficult to go through your whole site content and link to other posts and articles by hand.
Having a plugin that can do this automatically is a lot easier, right? Well, this is the plugin.
That concludes our list.
Are there any other plugins you’d like to point out?